Joanna Newsom on Divers, Her First Album in Five Years

Here’s how to listen to a Joanna Newsom album: Play it a couple times. Turn off your conscious mind, the one trained by pop songs to wait for hooks, choruses, certain rhythms, specific chord changes, turns of phrase. Don’t bother trying to understand what you’re hearing. Let Newsom’s music wash over the resistant cellular walls of your brain. Turn it off. Put it aside. Do something else. Let days go by, at least a week. Revisit it. You’ll find that something has happened at the molecular level. Suddenly the sounds that seemed so alien, so unpredictable, are resonating in your bones like long-lost melodies from childhood; suddenly the impenetrable, high-minded poetry of Newsom’s lyrics begins to cohere, rings elemental, brilliant, true.

Today Newsom releases her fourth album, Divers, already having received rapturous fanfare from critics at Pitchfork, The New York Times, and NPR. Divers, for which Newsom fans have been waiting five years, comprises 11 thematically and harmonically linked songs, nearly all of them less than six minutes long. When people talk about Newsom’s work, length tends to come up. That’s because each of her albums has confounded our expectations of who she is and what she does. Her debut, 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender, was made up of sweet little folk ditties, the type of lovely, earthy tunes that, combined with Newsom’s instrument of choice, the harp, and her long, honeyed Renaissance Faire hair, earned her an unjust reputation as some kind of freak folk, forest sprite. Then came 2006’s Ys, a darker, denser, orchestral collaboration with the composer and arranger Van Dyke Parks, containing only five songs, one that clocked in at nearly 17 minutes. Newsom’s follow-up, 2010’s Have One on Me, was epic in an entirely different way, a three-disc extravaganza chockablock with references to what seemed like Newsom’s entire, wide-ranging record collection. As Jon Pareles wrote recently in the Times, Newsom has finally cast off that “naïf” thing; she’s a “meticulous musical architect.”

And never has that rang more true than in the case of Divers, which Newsom tells me is “the closest thing to a concept record I’ve made,” though she’s “sort of scared to use that word because it has so many negative connotations.” It’s early September and we’re sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons in New York. Newsom is wearing a pinkish crop top and a patterned full skirt, a pink heart on a long gold chain dangling from her neck. Her hair is loose, long and wavy, and she has a tendency to push it back and play with it while she talks. Her face is animated and kind.

I’m dancing around the impulse to ask the singer to unravel the deliberately twisted skeins of her music, balancing my curiosity with the knowledge that this hasn’t been a productive line of questioning in the past. Instead we talk about New York, luckily a major player on Divers, which artfully investigates a handful of dichotomies: time and space; war and love; life and death; city and not. “It’s funny,” Newsom remembers with a giggle. “I was in Central Park today, and I was thinking: So many times, I had a dentist appointment like far in the 60s, and I would walk all the way home to the West Village because I just couldn’t stand the thought of getting in a cab or taking the subway. Everything was so loud and stinky and intense and jostling. I know there’s amazing, wonderful, beautiful things about New York, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t find them. It’s the way I’m wired.”

Newsom’s wiring is far better suited to Nevada City, the small Northern California mountain town where she grew up, the daughter of hippie doctors. Or even to Los Angeles, where she currently lives with her husband, the actor and comedian Andy Samberg. (L.A. is a compromise: “It’s not Nevada City,” she says mournfully, “but nothing is.”)

“I’m not a city person at all,” she continues. “New York and I found that we couldn’t agree on much.” She’s back in town to help her best friend find a wedding dress, and to promote Divers, an album she began writing during that four- or five-year period that she lived here on and off “for a boy,” meaning Samberg, during his SNL years. As much discomfort as she felt residing here—“I probably took the subway four times” total—the city weaseled its way into her lyrical universe.

There’s her song “Sapokanikan,” a reference to the Lenape name for the area we call Greenwich Village, whose lyrics touch on one of New York City’s early-20th-century mayors and a graveyard supposedly located underneath the Washington Square Arch. Her video for that track, made by her friend and “favorite living director,” Paul Thomas Anderson (she appeared in his 2014 big-screen adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice), depicts her wandering the downtown streets, singing aloud among bustling Manhattanites who don’t even look twice at the celebrity in their midst. “People here are used to crazy people walking down the street singing loudly,” she says. “Not a big deal.” Another song is called “Leaving the City” and contains a lament familiar to all New Yorkers: “The longer you live, the higher the rent,” Newsom sings with a trilling, stressed-out intensity.

Newsom tells me that she wrote the album from a place of “agitation.” It took half a decade to finish, in part because of her decision to collaborate with a different arranger on most tracks, among them the Dirty Projectors’s David Longstreth and the classical composer Nico Muhly. “The songs are kind of serving the same idea, or asking the same question,” she explains. “They’re connected narratively, in a really tight, close way. I think that made the central governing preoccupation really intense. I really wanted to sort it out.”

Newsom’s songs, dense with historical and literary Easter eggs, enter the world like encrypted codes waiting to be unlocked, logic problems waiting to be solved. Where does she find her more esoteric trivia, I ask, genuinely curious. And where does she file away all those details? “I get bees in my bonnet,” she says. “I start getting curious about something and I’ll go down a rabbit hole. I’m storing those facts in the place that I should be storing airline departure times and the pin number for my credit card and my doctor’s appointments. I’m constantly on the brink of complete personal ruin based on my inability to stay on top of shit, yet I can tell you a little bit about a lot of things.”

That may be, but the singer is famously reticent about explaining what it is all of those things mean. Even when she speaks about her lyrics, she tends to stay vague. (“I don’t want to solve the mystery, because it’s like explaining why a joke is funny,” she recently told Rolling Stone. “I can clumsily explain a song, but if I could perfectly explain it, it wouldn’t be a song.”)

That agita, the intense preoccupation she alludes to above: She defines it in terms of another artist’s work. It’s the same sensation she got when she first saw the photograph by Kim Keever that eventually became her album cover, a dreamlike landscape that the photographer created by sculpting a miniature nature scene, submerging it in an aquarium, and letting colorful dyes disperse, cloudlike, through the water. The feeling the image evoked was like “drinking four cups of coffee. Every time I looked at it I felt fidgety,” Newsom exclaims, doing a shivery little shimmy in her seat to demonstrate. She now has the photo hanging on her wall at home, having exorcised the angst by completing the album. “It’s like a storm that blew through. It’s in the record now.”

She also compares the feeling to the one she gets when watching a swallow fly “in that touchingly inefficient way, where their whole body is like this violent opening and closing of a book, sort of the bird equivalent of watching a newborn horse take its first few steps. They’re just wobbling.”

It’s no coincidence that she was thinking about the flight of swallows. Birds are big on Divers. Mourning doves coo rhythmically on the opening of the album’s first track, “Anecdotes,” and at the end of its last, the climactic crescendo of “Time, As a Symptom.” (Another connection between the two songs: “Time” ends with the word “Trans”; “Anecdotes” begins with the word “Sending.” Get it?) Another song is titled “Goose Eggs.” On the album’s inside cover, there’s a photo of Newsom looking balletic and ethereal in an Awaveawake silk slip dress with a macaw on her shoulder. (His name, she says, is Pepper, and she hired him: He’s a professional parrot.)

“Birds,” she tells me, are the inhabitants of the record, its players more than its subject. “They were all kind of acting out different roles, doing little soft shoes in one corner. They perform a few jobs that I need someone to perform. They embody poetically a railing against and even transcendence of what we perceive to be natural law. We’re earthbound, held here by gravity; they’re pushing up against that force. And they feel like messengers. They look at Earth from above. They look at the small comings and goings of people from above.”

As you may have already guessed, Newsom, though earthbound, is herself a fan of observing avian comings and goings. “I’ve gotten into bird-watching in my old age,” she says sheepishly. (She’s 33.) “Just a little bit.” Like, using binoculars? “Little bit, little bit.”

Other hobbies include watching TV—Game of Thrones, the first season of True Detective, Comedy Bang! Bang!, Key and Peele, Orange Is the New Black, The Americans, Homeland: “Kinda whatever I can get my grubby little meat hooks into”—and learning everything she can about 20th-century decorative arts. “It’s like aspirational curatorship,” she says. “I’m not buying Jean Royère pieces, but I’m certainly familiarizing myself with his entire catalog.”

In particular, she’s fallen for “Art Deco and Modernist textiles.” Her best score is a Sue et Mare rug that she bought at auction for a few hundred dollars. She discovered its provenance by studying a book of old Art Deco cartouche monograms, and eventually figured out that the Met has the same rug in a different color in its permanent collection.

Newsom’s interest in design, she says, has lately supplanted her interest in fashion, which she used to follow with the keen enthusiasm of a sports fan. “There was a spectatorship to the way I would pay attention,” she says. (She once even modeled for Armani.) So though she’s in New York at the peak of September Fashion Week, she’s not planning to attend any shows, nor any parties. “I still love beautiful garments,” she says. “The thing I don’t like about fashion is that it changes so fast. I don’t like disposability. Whenever I have something I love, I want to have it and appreciate it forever. I don’t want to change it. I don’t want to get rid of it. I don’t want it to be suddenly unacceptable to wear it or have in my house.”

Even so, aesthetics loom large in Newsom’s universe. The more you ask her about fashion, the more her knowledge and care come out. For someone as exacting as Newsom, the look of an album is as deliberate as its sound, her visual collaborators as carefully chosen as her musical ones.

Each album, she explains, features a new narrator—“it’s me, but with certain qualities magnified, and certain qualities left out”—and a new opportunity to play a role, to dress the part. In Have One on Me, that narrator was “extremely feminine and into clothing and staying up late and going to parties.” For Divers, it’s a bit trickier. “Fashion in general did not at all feel like a reference point for this album. There was a period of time where I was trying to figure out if it would be viable to wear a flight suit on tour. Just like a futuristic uniform. But it would be really hot, and I couldn’t really move in it. I’d be really sweaty and stiff.”

Get her going, and she'll eventually tell you what would actually work. “Annabel dubbed the aesthetic of the songs pastoral futurism,” Newsom says, referring to Annabel Mehran, her friend and “partner in crime when it comes to the visuals. It’s a little sci-fi, and the ’70s kept coming up—this funny moment where there were dancewear shapes. It was oddly utilitarian, but in this kind of misty way. Like, not hippie clothing, but later ’70s. Early pre-disco.”

When the flight suit idea tanked, Newsom turned to designer Michael van der Ham to create 10 or so stage looks that she’ll cycle through on different nights. “I’m so excited,” she says giddily. “He’s amazing. We’re going through all the lyrics. The exact thread colors, different jacquards, historical references, patterning—everything’s tied into the narrative of the record. He’s just an incredible, brilliant designer.”

Speaking of her upcoming tour: That part of the harp-star life is a challenge for Newsom, who says her ideal mode is “comfortable, familiar, and quiet. It’s not that I don’t like traveling, I just don’t like the way it tends to be a new place every night.” Her discomfort with itinerancy is tempered by the overwhelming joy she takes in performing. “Once a day there’s this moment that’s one of the most special experiences I will have in life, playing music in front of people who are listening. There’s an exchange, and it can sometimes be extremely magical. It makes everything else livable.”

And on this tour, for the first time, her older brother Pete, a drummer who plays on “Leaving the City” and “Time, As a Symptom,” will be along for the ride. “I love his drumming style. You can always feel it when the beat drops in. There’s always a little stank on his drums,” she says, laughing, her country-girl voice drawing out the hard A, and with it the sense of joy I feel each time Newsom, in song or in conversation, upends expectation and says something wholly vernacular. “It’s interesting. I think I never asked him before because he’s my brother. Maybe in my 20s, I was about constantly meeting new people, working with new people. In my old age I think I’m coming back to just wanting to be around the people I know the best and trust the most. It’s going to be good. He’s going to be really fun to tour with.”

But before any of that can happen, she’s got her best friend’s wedding in Northern California’s Russian River Valley. It just so happens to coincide with her album release this weekend, but for Newsom, that was a no-brainer. “I’m choosing the wedding,” she says dismissively. “I’m just putting everything on hold.”

The world has waited five years for Divers. It can wait one more weekend for Joanna Newsom.